Here's my example:
[*]Categories which have 1-n association to Products (most likely m-n association but that's not important--I don't think)
[*]Categories also have 1-{0..10} association to "Top 10" Products which may or may not be the same as Product association above

This way you could do:

lazy init


-or-
eager fetching


My question is: Is it possible to have size-bound associations like this in Hibernate? Ideally, association would be both size-bound and have other additional criteria that defines the association.

There are a lot of solutions for such problem. The easiest one is to only map "getProducts()" in Hibernate and implement "getTopTenProducts()" in such a way that it will return ten of them.

If this is not OK to you, you can always have native SQL in mapping (see formula column for more details) or view that defines needed association properly.

Won't this require me to load ALL product associated to a category when all I want is 10? If a category has thousands of products, it seems like a waste to have to load all of them just to turn around and only use 10.

The ultimate aim here is I'd like to do something like the following:



And get back a list of Category objects all with their top ten products pre-loaded without having Hibernate load ALL of the products for each category.

Make a custom view then.

Another solution would be to load the association based on custom SQL using the loader element in your hbm file. The custom SQL could limit the number of elements you need depending on a parameter.